We flew into Singapore and, if we are honest, the change was a bit of a relief. The country's drachonian laws regarding littering, spitting, flushing toilets and chewing gum are somewhat over-the-top but make for one hell of a clean city! The cars all head in one direction, there are proper pedestrian crossings and the roads are all clearly labelled (although this didn't stop us getting hideously lost one time and going round in a big circle for an hour.)
As cities go, it was much as I remembered it - nice, but not a great deal to do unless you have a lot of money to spend on clothes or food. We stayed at the Inn Crowd hostel, in dorm beds for the first time on the trip, which was central, clean and well-run, but had offically the smallest toilet cubicles in the world. You had to sit completely sideways on the seat to shut the door!
After driving ourselves mad with Christmas music, just looking for simple toiletries in about a billion shopping malls, we treated ourselves to afternoon tea and, later, the very tasty and overpriced obligatory Singapore Sling from Raffles hotel. Then the next day it was off on an overnight train to another city of shopping - Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
We spent one night in KL before getting another overnight train to Thailand. We did a bit of wandering around and had two failed attempts to visit the viewing platform at the famous Petronas Towers. The first time, it was simply closed on that day of the week, and by lunchtime the following day, they had already sold their maximum allowance of tickets. So all we could do was go in the shopping mall that occupied the first four floors of the building (hooray - another mall)- which wasn't really much of a replacement.
Anyway, we saw a bit of the city on their super-efficient train system of underground and monorail, and we were reay to make another border crossing into Thailand.
